Captivated by a Lady's Charm

by Christi Caldwell

  “It is—”

  “An elm,” he supplied. Odd, the lady should put to page countless others he’d seen, others he could not discern, and yet this one should be so very clear. That image he’d carried from Waterloo that still haunted his mind. Feeling burned by the book, he snapped her sketchpad closed and quickly turned it over to her care.

  Her wide smile revealed a slight dimple in her right cheek. “You recognize it as an elm?” How had he not noticed that endearing mark before now? He clung to that question and revelation rolled into one for it pulled him back from the horror upon the page.

  “Is it not an elm?”

  She shook her head, knocking her bonnet askew. “Oh, no. Indeed, it is. In fact, it is that particular elm.” He followed her point to the tree just beyond his shoulder. With her book tucked under her left arm, she used her right hand to readjust her velvet headpiece. “I am merely surprised you identified it as such.”

  Standing there, he was staggered by the realization that the lady did, in fact, know the extent of her artistic skills.

  As though she’d followed the unspoken direction of his thoughts, Prudence said, “I know very well my ability.” She untucked her sketchpad and waved it about. “Or in this case, my lack of ability. I do not delude myself or others into believing I am one thing, or striving to prove I am something different than what I am.”

  Her words, unerringly accurate, ran through him with a shocking potency. How many years had he been hiding under the façade of one thing, while he, and a handful of others, all knew the truth about just the kind of soldier, and worse, the kind of man he’d been—and was?

  The fates putting that image upon her pages had merely served as a taunting reminder of his total lack of worth and the wrongness of encouraging interest in this wide-eyed innocent. At best he was a rogue. At worst he was a coward. Those truths alone were reason enough to steer clear of Lady Prudence Tidemore.

  A strong wind stirred the dry branches overhead and he momentarily looked at the grey, aged limbs. The morning sky painted white with winter’s grimness peeked through those branches. An elm. He squinted up and took in the wishbone shape of the barren tree and glanced to the book clasped in her fingers. “It was this tree,” he said quietly.

  She nodded. Her elm. It was the image upon her page.

  “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Prudence’s softly spoken words pulled him back from his bleak musings.

  “I hate elms.”

  She started, looking at him with the same shock she might have if he’d told her there was no heaven. Feeling he owed her more than that cryptic handful of words, he said, “There was an elm on the edge of Waterloo. Anytime I see one, it,” reminds me of death. “Reminds me of that day.” It was why he came here day in and day out. In this way, he would never forget. As though he could. Never before had he shared that detail with any person; not even Maxwell, who’d dwelled in that very real hell alongside him. Yet, he’d wanted Prudence to know…for reasons he could not understand.

  She motioned to the tree beside them. “I love this particular elm. It is the reason I come here.”

  What irony that they two should be brought to the same spot, yet for two very different reasons. He came not for the beauty of this tree, but for the memories attached to another; of a particular, narrow elm on the edge of a bloodied Brussels battlefield. The roguish charmer he’d spent these years striving to be should have managed a half-grin and words of concurrence, but he could not bring himself to force out the lie. Instead, he followed her gaze skyward.

  “My sister, Patrina, was married here.” Her words startled him back to attention. He glanced skeptically about. “Well, not here, per se.” She motioned behind her to a large boulder in the distance. “She met her husband over by that very spot and he arranged for them to be married there.” A small, wistful smile played on her lips. It sucked the breath from his lungs at the allure of innocence he wanted to drown himself in. Goodness that still existed. Hope. Prudence wandered closer to the tree and brushed her palm along the roughened bark. “During their ceremony, I looked past Patrina and Weston and saw this tree. And I, of course, began to wonder about it. It looked so very old.” She looked at him as though expecting a response.

  “Indeed it is old, I’d wager.”

  She gave a nod of approval. “Yes, that was the thought I had. But then I thought about what it had seen.” Prudence continued to brush her palm up and down the gnarled trunk and he took in that slightly erotic gesture momentarily distracted from the hell of his past that she’d forced him to walk down with the talk of this blasted tree. “It saw my sister and Weston’s first meeting and their wedding. How many other loving couples met here?” Her words snapped him from his reverie and set warning bells clamoring. Talks of love were dangerous and presented risks he’d not enter in to with a good, innocent young lady such as Prudence Tidemore.

  Then, she suddenly stopped and examined the remnants of the tree’s bark that had flaked off in her hand, a little moue of surprise on her lips.

  Death. A chill ran through him that had nothing to do with the winter cold.

  Her innocent accounting of that bloody elm merely highlighted how very different they were. She saw love and hope beneath this ancient elm, but he saw nothing more than a nearly deadened tree that harkened him back to a chaotic battlefield and the metallic scent of blood as men had died around him. “It is dead.” His voice emerged in flat, hollow tones. “And it should be removed.” Purged from this park, his memory, and then promptly burned for all the hell attached to it.

  Prudence gasped, touching her fingertips to her lips. “Never.” The hint of a frown pulled her lips down in the corners. “That isn’t altogether true. See?”

  Christian followed her finger skyward to a patch of brown, deadened leaves that clung to one branch. He peered up. “What am I supposed to be looking at, my lady?”

  She wagged a finger at the old elm. “You see, some of the magnificent tree might be aged and even dying, but it still lives and should be celebrated for that.”

  He locked his feet to the deadened, winter ground as with her innocent talk of elms, she shook the foundation of his world. “Perhaps.” Christian prayed with his noncommittal reply, she’d let the matter of the elm rest.

  Prudence tossed her head back and inhaled deeply. “I adore winter. The air is crisper, the sky painted in shades of whites and greys a person did not know existed within a color palate. And then there is snow.” She said that last part as if she spoke of some magical force that could cure all life’s woes.

  …I adore zee summer sun upon my skin… Lynette’s bell-like laugh trilled through his mind; as practiced as the words of love on her lips that summer day.

  When he spoke, his tone came out gruffer than he intended. “I thought all ladies enjoyed the warm summer sun?” he asked in a desperate bid to liken her to Lynette, that great betrayer. For only then would his ordered world be stabilized once more.

  Prudence held his stare. “Not all elms are the same, Christian.” And neither were all women. That staggering realization sucked the air from his lungs. “This elm was not your elm.”

  He shot a hand out and brushed his knuckles along her jawline. “Are you always this hopeful and optimistic?” And surely there must be a way to capture a hint of her essence and merge his soul with that innocence.

  “I am.” Her eyes fluttered closed and she leaned into his touch the way a kitten might seek warmth on this chilled day. “What is the alternative? Accepting that my fate has been sealed and I shall be forever whispered about and never wedded?”

  At those last words, warning bells went off in his rogue’s ears all the louder. Of course the romantic, hopeful Prudence would dream of marriage. Yet, hearing that word uttered was enough to cause his feet to twitch with the urge to turn on his heel and stalk off. This effervescent, unspoiled by life woman did not belong to cowardly bastards with nothing to offer her, particularly men such as he who did not trust the sent
iment of love. “Your view of the world is an idealized one.” He let his hand fall to his side.

  She must have heard something in his tone for her frown deepened. “You must see the good that exists.”

  His ears rang with the sobs and screams of men drawing their last breath upon the bloodied fields of Waterloo and he ached to clamp his hands over them and blot out the agonized sounds that would never go away.

  “Christian?” she prodded gently, concern underscoring his name.

  He gave his head a shake. “My experience on the battlefield has taught me that goodness is more fleeting and rarer than a star streaking across the night sky.” Yet this woman was proof of the good that still lived. He curled his hands tightly. He’d long ago given up the right to anything good.

  “How old were you when you left for war?”

  He blinked at her softly spoken question. “Seventeen.”

  Shock, horror, and sadness marred the delicate planes of her face. She angled her head. “But you were so young.”

  Unease stirred at the questions in her eyes and on her lips. He’d spent years avoiding all talk of the war. “As old as most of the men fighting.”

  She touched her trembling fingers to her lips and, for an instant, he detected a faint sheen over her fathomless, blue eyes.

  The tears he’d known from women through the years had proven a carefully crafted ruse to weaken him. He was fast learning however, that there was no artifice where Prudence was concerned. Christ. He did not want pity from her or sadness. Unable to bear confronting all the emotions he spied in her expressive eyes, Christian looked away. Needing to say something, he said, “It was a long time ago.” Those words said nothing about him or who he was or what he’d done, or in this case, not done…and by her next words, she knew as much.

  “That does not make that experience go away.” She slid her fingers into his, and at the unexpectedness of that gentle, comforting touch, he stiffened. “That is why you do not believe in hope and love,” she said that last part more to herself.

  He did not believe in love because he’d given his heart to a woman. Trusted her with his secrets; secrets that hadn’t been solely his. And through that youthful naiveté, he’d cost so many everything on the battlefields of Toulouse.

  Prudence raised her gaze to his and he braced for her inquiries. Inevitably, they all asked. With the women before, it had been more a macabre fascination with a gentleman who’d slayed people with his hands. With Prudence, there too were questions, but these were ones of emotional depth, ones he’d avoided discussing with anyone—including his closest friend, Maxwell, who’d danced with the devil alongside him on those fields of Europe.

  “Why would you have gone off to battle?” she asked softly.

  Why, indeed.

  Her inquiries were not the ones put to him by those fascinated ladies. Hers pertained to who he was and decisions he’d made, and not those horrific deeds in the name of war and honor. “I was young. I was brash and hopeful.” The need to place distance between him and this young woman filled him and drove him away from her. He wandered closer to the thick trunk of the elm and ran his gloved palm over the hard, uneven surface. All the while he spoke, his skin pricked with the intensity of her stare. “I was also only a baronet’s son. A poor one at that.” He chuckled, the sound mirthless, devoid of any real humor. Baronet or marquess, he was doomed to be a pauper. “I thought it sounded a grand adventure and then, I was always eager for a grand adventure.”

  Prudence stood with her gaze fixed on Christian. The air thrummed with charged energy between them. Her heart pulled at the ragged emotion in those chocolate brown eyes. He spoke of his previous need for adventure. How very alike they were in that regard. She had spent the better part of her life wishing for more, wanting to see more, and detesting the constraints that kept her bound. Yet, Christian had moved beyond their isolated world. He’d gone to war. He’d seen too much. She thought of Sin’s revelation at Lady Drake’s ball. “I had heard—” she said softly. She bit the inside of her cheek.

  Christian shot a glance over his shoulder. “I didn’t take you for a gossip.” Having a brother who’d plotted and longed for escape from his bothersome sisters, she recognized in this man a hungering to be free of her. Or was it this exchange he wanted over?

  She tipped her chin up. “I am not.” Pain pulled at her heart, hating both options that left the affable, charming man she’d met on the street, bitter and angry with the past.

  When he looked back, he favored her with a dry half-grin. “Were you making inquiries about me, my lady?”

  At the faintly mocking challenge, she pursed her lips. “I was not making inquiries about you,” she lied. A splash of guilty heat slapped her cheeks and she prayed he’d credit the color to the winter cold. Did it truly count if one had asked one’s family about the gentleman?

  The ghost of a smile hovering on his lips indicated he’d detected that mistruth. Christian swept his lashes downward. “Do you know, Prudence?” he whispered, his gaze lingering upon her burning cheeks. “I do not believe you,” he spoke on a husky whisper while slowly striding back over to her.

  Prudence backed up a step. She’d sought him out. Yet she did not know what to do with Christian’s primitive rawness. “D-do not be s-silly,” she stammered, casting a glance about, knowing how those panicked deer felt when hunters came near. For Christian, with his piercing stare and unrelenting set to his jaw, was very much a hunter who’d have truths from her lips. “Wh-what could I possible w-wish to find out about you?” Other than his suitability as a husband and the story of his past?

  As if he’d followed that dangerous to any rogue path her thoughts wandered, he narrowed his eyes all the more. “What knowledge could you possibly wish to know about?”

  If he knew, he’d surely turn on his heel, running. “Er, is there specific information you think I should know?” After all, he would know a good deal more than Sin, who’d merely offered bits and strands of gossip that, together, probably could not make a whole fabricated story about the marquess.

  “Do you wish to know my favorite color?”

  How could that innocuous question contain this seductive, dangerous undertone?

  Prudence backed into the tree trunk and shot her hands out to steady herself. She cocked her head. “B-blue?”

  He eyed her as though she’d sprouted another head. “Oh, you were being sarcastic.” She skirted ’round the tree, keeping close to the steady, comforting strength of the trunk. “I am dreadful with detecting sarcasm. Why can a person not simply say what they wish and mean what they say?” Oh, blast she was running on like a magpie in spring. Stop rambling, Prudence. She promptly closed her lips.

  Old, dried leaves and snow-covered earth crunched noisily under his riding boots as he resumed walking and daunted by the powerful emotion emanating from his person, she retreated another step.

  The sketchpad slipped from her fingertips and landed with a thump on the ground. She stopped and eyed it for a moment, and briefly, very briefly considered abandoning her beloved leather book. Except, too much of her past existed within those pages, and she’d not be cowed into abandoning it by a prickly marquess who sought to run her off. Prudence bent and retrieved it. When she straightened, a startled gasp escaped her. Her heart thundered hard.

  Christian stood with just a handbreadth between them, eying her through his thick, golden lashes.

  Prudence held that book close to her chest and tipped her head back to meet his gaze square on, that courage belied by the fluttering nervousness in her belly. “Do you know what I believe? I believe you seek to change the subject away from yourself, my lord.” He jerked erect. Was she accurate in her supposition? “I believe it is far easier to don a cold, aloof edge and pepper me with questions than it is for you to share more of yourself than you already have.” Her chest rose and fell with the force of her emotion and her breath stirred the air about them.

  Silence fell between them and she remai
ned stock-still as he ran his heated gaze over her face. What was he thinking? She would trade her left littlest finger for that truth. “I have never met a woman such as you.”

  Her heart flipped over itself and the fight went out of her. Through the years, she’d endured the at times nauseating endearments her brother bestowed upon his beloved wife. “Goddess of my heart” had been the one to make her point her eyes to the ceiling. “Keeper of my soul” had been another phrase to earn frequent giggles from the Tidemore sisters. Yet, in secret, through each hungering look and stolen caress, Prudence had averted her gaze and wished. Wished to know a love such as theirs. Wished to have a good, devoted, and passionate gentleman who saw her and only her. Wished to have one of those compliments paid her by a man who loved her.

  I have never met a woman such as you…

  And yet, somehow the raw honesty and simplicity of Christian’s words washed over her with more power and warmth than any effusive, flowery language ever would. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I suppose I should hope to be more like all those other Societal ladies. My mother despaired of me ever becoming like them and yet—”

  “Do not change.” He palmed her cheek once more, and she closed her eyes a moment, hating Society’s call for gloves, and even the cold winter for meriting the need for those gloves anyway that denied her the feel of his skin against hers. “There are enough vapid, emotionless ladies. I would have you as you are.”

  Oh, God. Another portion of her heart sliced off and fell into his hands; this man who waltzed with forgotten wallflowers, and rescued young girls from the park, and as she’d discovered today, a gentleman who’d fought upon the fields of battle. Until this exchange she’d only known a piece of him. This was the man she’d want. This was the brave, courageous figure she’d take as her husband. “You would have me as I am?” she asked, shamed at her own small-mindedness. “You would praise me with your words as though I am someone honorable, but I am not. Not in the way you, yourself are. You are a hero, Christian. A man of honor and valor and courage—”